Trigger Joy, Trigger Healing, Trigger love

This photo popped up in my memories today and immediately took me back to Bali, flying through the air on a swing with that glorious mixture of freedom, beauty, ridiculousness and play that makes you feel very alive.

I can look at the photo now, years later, and something of the experience returns. Not in exactly the same way, of course. I am sitting here looking at a photograph rather than swinging through the Bali air, but my body responds to the image. I remember the feeling. My face changes. There is warmth, gratitude, generosity, connection, and that delicious quality of playfulness that can disappear remarkably quickly when we get busy being serious grown-ups.

I love that.

An experience happened once, yet something of its imprint remains available to me. We tend to understand this very easily when the memory is uncomfortable. Something reminds us of an earlier experience and suddenly the past has found its way into the present. A smell, a place, someone's tone of voice, a particular expression on a face, and the human instrument responds. Memory isn't always experienced as a tidy story filed away in the mind; it can arrive through sensation, emotion, imagery, association, physiology and the almost instantaneous meaning we make of what is happening now.

We speak a great deal about these difficult imprints, and rightly so. Understanding the way our histories participate in our present experience is an important part of human development. Yet I have become equally interested in another question: if our organism can become familiar with pathways of fear, protection and dis-ease, what happens when we deliberately give attention to experiences of joy, love, beauty, connection and freedom?

This isn't about pretending everything is wonderful. I have no interest in using joy as a brightly coloured curtain we pull across grief, anger, fear or whatever else is genuinely asking to be experienced. All of it belongs to this extraordinary spectrum of being human. What interests me is our participation in where attention goes.

I have noticed in my own life that the more I invite my mind to remember joyful experiences, the more readily they seem to appear. It is almost as though I am reminding the instrument, these are part of your history too. There is neurobiological shift. That matters to me.

Our histories aren't made only from the experiences that hurt us. They also contain the afternoon we laughed until we couldn't breathe, the person whose presence made our whole body soften, the ridiculous adventure, the music that cracked something open, the first swim of summer, the smell of somebody we loved, the dog that greeted us as though we'd returned from a decade-long expedition when we'd only been out for twenty minutes.

There are thousands of these moments woven through a life and many of them disappear from immediate attention simply because we're no longer looking in their direction. A photograph can bring one back.

So can music. Smell is magnificent at it. Movement can do it. A conversation. A piece of clothing. Returning to a place. Closing our eyes and deliberately allowing ourselves to remember not merely what happened, but what the experience felt like from within.

There is something quite different about remembering Bali as a fact, I went on a swing, and allowing myself to receive the sensory image again: the height, the air, the movement, the landscape, the laughter, the freedom of surrendering to the swing and letting myself be carried through space. Now the memory has some juice in it, this is where a simple photograph becomes a practice in attention.

I can stay with the feeling for a little longer instead of glancing at it and moving on. I can let myself enjoy it without needing to turn it into anything productive. I can notice what joy feels like in my particular instrument. I can marinate in it. Where does it live? Does the chest open? Does breath move differently? Does my face soften? Do I want to move, laugh, reach towards somebody, create something, go outside?

The interesting thing is that joy rarely seems to remain an isolated little emotion. When I give it room, other qualities often come along for the ride. Generosity appears. Beauty becomes easier to notice. I feel more affectionate towards people. Creativity has a little more room. Play becomes possible. Gratitude isn't something I need to manufacture because it has arisen naturally from the experience itself.

This is what I mean by marinating.

Rather than grabbing a pleasant memory and quickly demanding that it improve me, I can spend some time in relationship with the qualities it awakens. Let the instrument receive them again. Let attention linger. There is good reason to be interested in this from what we understand about memory, attention and the brain's capacity to change through experience, but I don't want to reduce the whole thing to biochemistry. Biochemistry participates, absolutely. So do the nervous system, emotion, perception, imagination, sensory experience and the meaning we give things. Through the wider lens of my work I am also interested in the energetic tone of an experience—the very different quality we can feel in ourselves when we are contracted, connected, joyful, frightened, playful, loving or free.

We know these differences from the inside. We also know them in one another.

Walk into a room where someone is genuinely delighted to see you and something is communicated before either of you has delivered a lecture on your respective internal states. Joy has expression. Love has expression. Playfulness has expression. They move through faces, voices, bodies, gestures, attention and what becomes possible between people.

So this little practice isn't only about feeling good. It is an exploration of what we are nourishing within the instrument and, consequently, what becomes more available for expression through it.

I think this is an important distinction because conscious creation can easily be misunderstood as trying to control reality with our thoughts. That isn't what I mean. Life will continue to bring the full spectrum. Things will happen that we would never consciously order from the menu, and when grief comes I want the capacity to grieve; when anger has intelligence I want to hear it; when fear communicates something important I don't want to paste a smiling Bali photograph over its mouth.

I also don't want to unconsciously rehearse dis-ease simply because the mind has become extraordinarily good at finding it.

There is room to become intimate with the difficult and to deliberately nourish what is beautiful. For me, that is part of self-governance: developing enough relationship with attention to recognise that I can participate in what I repeatedly give life to.

Today a photograph did it for me. Bali. A swing. A moment of surrender and ridiculous joy that my human instrument apparently still remembers rather well. So I am letting myself enjoy the memory. I am giving it a little airtime, allowing the feeling to move through me again and noticing what comes with it. Love. Beauty. Connection. Generosity. Freedom. Play.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. What a lovely thing to discover tucked away in the archives of myself and what a lovely reminder that when we go looking through our history, there is so much more there than what hurt.

There is also what made us come alive.

• Ways in which we can cultivate and infuse the feedback of joy to be a pattern rich in the embodiment is.

  • Bring out your album of great vibes and trigger the feels.

  • Enliven the practice of appreciation. Look at what you do, have or have had and feel the feels. Who was involved and how did they support you in your now. Good, bad and ugly. Dive into the appreciation station.

  • Bring on your child like spirit. Remember what it feels like to truly play, just for playing sake.

  • Have fun, smile and laugh at many things.

Here’s to triggering more joy and living life in this moment. 🌟💖

#JoyfulMemories #HealingThroughJoy #BaliSwing #LivingLifeFully

Women’s circle - The Intelligence of the Feminine

What becomes possible when women gather and give attention to the feminine qualities moving through them?

What a crackin' circle of goodness. There are moments in facilitation when you can almost feel a room change tone.

Bodies soften. Voices become more available. Movement emerges. Someone expresses something that gives another permission to feel something within herself. Laughter moves through the room. Vulnerability appears without needing to be fixed.

Something begins to hum. This is one of the things that fascinates me about women's circles.

Not simply women gathering to talk, but what becomes available when a group of human instruments come together and intentionally give attention to the energetics of the feminine.

Feminine Does Not Mean Female

This distinction matters. When I speak about feminine and masculine energetics, I am not using feminine as another word for woman or masculine as another word for man. I experience them as qualities or energetic architectures that can move through human beings irrespective of gender. Each of us carries our own composition. We may experience qualities associated with the feminine — receptivity, intuition, nurturing, creativity, sensuality, relational awareness, fluidity, feeling, collaboration, gestation and qualities associated with the masculine; direction, discernment, structure, focus, action, containment, protection, penetration, orientation.

These aren't rigid boxes. Nor do I see one as spiritually superior to the other. They are different qualities of expression and within each human instrument they can meet in unique proportions, forms and relationships.

The inquiry isn't:

Which one is better?

It is:

What is moving here? What has been given expression? What has been suppressed? What has become distorted? And what becomes possible when these qualities are brought into greater relationship and harmony?

The Female Body as an Instrument

There is another dimension to this that interests me. Although feminine energy is not exclusive to women, being born into and living through a female body creates a particular field of human experience.

• Biology participates.

• Genetics participate.

• Hormonal rhythms participate.

• Family history participates.

• Culture participates.

• Relationship participates.

• The experiences held within and interpreted through the body participate.

So do generations of stories about what it means to inhabit a female body; what is acceptable, desirable, dangerous, powerful, shameful, beautiful, sexual, maternal, expressive or forbidden and through my own experiential and energetic lens, I am interested in the possibility that all of this contributes to the tone of the instrument. The body carries memory in many form, some we can describe biologically. Some psychologically. Some culturally and relationally and some I experience more subtly'; through sensation, resonance, energy and the ways the organism responds before the intellect has found language. I don't need all of these dimensions to be the same thing. I am interested in how they meet.

What Happens When the Instruments Gather?

Put one instrument in a room and it has its tone. Bring many instruments together and another phenomenon becomes possible.

Resonance.

This is where women's circles become particularly interesting to me. When female-bodied human beings gather with intention, there can be an opportunity to experience qualities of the feminine not simply as ideas, but as something tangible within the body and within the collective environment. One woman moves and another recognises something in herself. One woman allows vulnerability and another nervous system discovers that vulnerability can be met rather than rejected. Someone expresses pleasure without apology. Someone else recognises how long she has withheld hers. Someone receives instead of immediately giving. Someone speaks. Someone listens. Someone laughs loudly. Someone takes up space. Someone softens. The field changes and the individual instruments within it respond.

This is where the subjective and collective begin speaking to one another.

Beyond Competition

Women have not always experienced other women as safe. Competition, comparison, judgement, jealousy, exclusion and manipulation can become expressions within female relationships but, I don't see these as evidence of something inherently wrong with the feminine. They can be understood as dissonant expressions arising within human systems shaped by fear, scarcity, conditioning, protection and lived experience. A women's circle can provide another environment. Not one where everyone must agree. Not one where everything is soft and certainly not one where difficulty is spiritually bypassed in the name of “sisterhood.’ but an environment in which we can become curious about what happens when women give attention to support rather than comparison, collaboration rather than competition, expression rather than suppression, and curiosity rather than judgement.

Repeated experience matters, because what we experience within one environment can begin to influence what becomes available within us elsewhere.

Remembering Through the Body

There is something I find particularly beautiful about exploring feminine energetics through movement, breath, sound, sensation, creativity and relationship. We are no longer only discussing the feminine.

We are giving the organism an opportunity to experience it.

• What does receiving feel like in my body?

• What happens when I move without performing?

• Can I experience sensuality without immediately relating it to sexuality or desirability?

• What happens when I allow intuition to have a voice?

• Can I nurture without abandoning myself?

• Can I be fluid without losing direction?

• Can I experience softness without equating it with weakness?

• Can I receive support without needing to earn it?

• These become experiential inquiries and perhaps something that has existed only as an intellectual concept begins to find its way into the physical instrument.

Understanding begins to marinate into lived experience.

The Feminine and Masculine in Relationship

The deeper inquiry, however, isn't about creating a world dominated by feminine energy. That would simply recreate imbalance in another direction. I am interested in harmonisation through our true nature.

The feminine and masculine can become extraordinarily generative when their different qualities are available to one another.

• Structure can support creativity.

• Direction can meet intuition.

• Action can emerge from listening.

• Containment can create conditions for surrender.

• Discernment can protect what is tender.

• Receptivity can reveal where action wants to move.

• Neither disappears.

• Neither dominates.

Each becomes more available to its own intelligence while participating in something larger and this inquiry belongs to all human beings, not only women.

From the Individual to the Collective

This brings me back to the question that runs through so much of my work:

What happens in the collective when something changes within the individual?

If a woman develops a different relationship with her own feminine expression, she doesn't leave that experience in the circle. She takes the instrument with her.

• Into relationship.

• Into family.

• Into creativity.

• Into sexuality.

• Into parenting.

• Into friendship.

• Into leadership.

• Into organisations.

• Into community.

Likewise, when any human being gives attention to the relationship between masculine and feminine qualities within themselves, the expression they bring into their environment may change. The tone entering the field is different and when another instrument encounters that tone, something else may become possible.

This is the multidimensional nature of development that fascinates me.

Individual awareness becomes embodied expression.
Embodied expression enters relationship.
Relationship participates in environment.
Environment participates in the collective.

And the collective, in turn, continues to influence the individual. There is no neat beginning or end. There is relationship. There is resonance. There is harmonics. There is participation.

A Circle Is a Place to Practise

Perhaps this is one of the gifts of gathering. A women's circle doesn't need to provide an answer to what the divine feminine is. Perhaps defining it too rigidly would miss the point. Instead, it can create an environment in which we become curious about its qualities.

• To move them.

• Feel them.

• Question them.

• Express them.

• Play with them.

• Notice where they have become suppressed or distorted.

• Notice where they are already beautifully alive and experience what happens when different expressions of the feminine are allowed to coexist in the same field.

Not to become more feminine.

Not to reject the masculine. Not to perform an idea of womanhood. But to become increasingly available to the unique composition of intelligence seeking expression through each of us. Perhaps that is where the real elevation occurs. Not feminine above masculine. Not woman above man but awareness elevating our capacity to recognise, harmonise and consciously express the many qualities already moving through the human instrument. when we do that together?

Well...

something begins to hum.

Continue the exploration

Essence Energetics®

Essence Energetics® explores the physical, emotional, psychological, energetic and spiritual dimensions of the human experience — becoming increasingly sensitive to the intelligence of life moving through us and the unique ways it seeks expression.

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The Gifts of Self-Discovery in Relationships

What becomes possible when relationship becomes a place of discovery rather than judgement?

There is a quote I came across many years ago:

“We are all like books. Most people only see our cover. The minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.”

It made me smile because there is something wonderfully human in it. We meet one another through covers.

Appearances. Behaviours. Personalities. Roles. Reactions. Stories.

The version of someone we think we know and yet beneath the cover of every human being exists an extraordinary inner world — history, emotion, conditioning, sensation, memory, desire, fear, imagination, energy, consciousness, spirit and ways of perceiving life that another person may never completely know.

Perhaps one of the great gifts of relationship is that another human being gives us an opportunity to discover more of that world within ourselves.

Relationship as a Mirror

Self-discovery can sound like a solitary pursuit. We imagine ourselves meditating on a mountain, journalling, contemplating life or disappearing on retreat to “find ourselves.”

And all of those experiences can offer beautiful opportunities for inquiry.

Then we come home and someone we love says the wrong thing in exactly the wrong tone, and suddenly there we are.

There is the practice.

Relationship has an extraordinary capacity to reveal us. What opens us. What contracts us. What we protect. What we long for. What we assume. What we fear. What we expect another person to provide. The places where we feel free and the places where an old reflex can take over before awareness has even entered the room. None of this needs to mean something has gone wrong. It is information.

The mirror is showing us something.

Two Inner Worlds Meet

Every relationship brings together more than two personalities. Two histories meet. Two nervous systems. Two sets of conditioning. Two emotional landscapes. Two bodies of lived experience. Two ways of perceiving and interpreting the world., through another lens, two energetic expressions of life. Each person is experiencing the relationship subjectively while simultaneously becoming part of the other's environment.

This is where relationship becomes multidimensional.

• There is me.

• There is you.

• And there is also what is being created between us.

  A relational field begins to form through our words, attention, expectations, touch, silences, reactions, presence, energy and choices.

  We influence it and are influenced by it. Sometimes what moves between two people is obvious. Sometimes it is subtle. A shift in someone's body. A change in tone. A withdrawal. An opening. Something sensed before a word has been spoken. Our human instruments are continually communicating.

  From Projection to Curiosity

  Without awareness, it can be remarkably easy to make another person responsible for what is moving inside us.

  You made me feel this. You should know what I need. If you changed, I could relax. Or perhaps we move in the opposite direction and make ourselves responsible for everything. Neither offers much freedom.

  Self-discovery introduces another possibility - curiosity.

  What is happening within me? What belongs to this moment, and what might be familiar from somewhere else? What is my body communicating? What story has my mind constructed? Is this an old protective response? What am I actually longing for? What am I afraid to reveal? Can I stay present long enough to discover what lies beneath my first reaction?

  This doesn't mean denying another person's behaviour or abandoning our boundaries.

  It means developing enough relationship with ourselves that we can begin to distinguish between what is happening, what we are experiencing, and what we choose to do with that experience.

  This is self-governance in relationship.

  Intimacy Begins Within

  We often think intimacy is something another person gives us. But perhaps our capacity to be intimate with another is intimately related to our capacity to meet ourselves. Can I feel what I feel without immediately escaping it? Can I communicate desire? Can I allow myself to be seen? Can I hear another person's experience without automatically making it a judgement of me? Can I remain connected to myself while also being available to you? Can I meet difference without requiring sameness? Can I allow love, pleasure, tenderness and play to be as worthy of my attention as difficulty?

  This last question matters.

  Relationship work can become so preoccupied with what is wrong that we forget to become curious about what allows human beings to thrive together.

  Connection.

  Safety.

  Freedom.

  Touch.

  Honesty.

  Laughter.

  Desire.

  Play.

  Creativity.

  Repair.

  Space.

  Shared experience.

  The willingness to keep discovering one another. These, too, deserve our attention.

  The Relationship Becomes a Field of Creation

  As awareness develops, relationship can become something more than a place where two histories continually react to one another.

  It can become a place of conscious creation. Not because every reaction disappears. Not because two people reach some perfected state of consciousness. But because increasingly there is awareness within the process. I can notice myself. I can become curious about you. We can recognise what is happening between us and from that awareness, another response may become available.

  Reaction can become response.
  Defence can become curiosity.
  Assumption can become communication.
  Protection can make room for connection.
  Inherited patterns can meet conscious choice.

  Something changes in the field between us and that matters beyond the relationship itself. The ways we love, listen, react, repair, parent, communicate and express ourselves ripple into families, friendships, communities and the environments we inhabit. From this perspective, the work of relationship is simultaneously personal, relational and collective.

  How we meet one another becomes part of the world we collectively create.

  Reading Beyond the Cover

  Perhaps we never completely finish reading another human being. Perhaps we aren't supposed to. There will always be another page. Another chapter. Something we misunderstood. Something newly revealed. Something that changes. Something neither of us expected and perhaps that's part of the beauty.

  True intimacy isn't knowing everything about another person. It is developing the capacity to remain curious enough to keep discovering. To read beyond the cover. To question the critics. To become aware of the stories we've written about one another. and to allow ourselves to be surprised by what is still unfolding.

  Relationship then becomes more than somewhere we go to have our needs met.

  It becomes one of the great environments in which we discover what it means to be human.

  And occasionally, reflected in the eyes of another, we may glimpse something of ourselves we had never before been able to see.

  Continue the exploration

  Conscious Relationship

  Intimate relationship can be one of our richest environments for human development — revealing our conditioning, emotional patterns, nervous-system responses, desires, protective strategies and capacity for love, intimacy, freedom and conscious creation.

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Elevating Consciousness

"The full spectrum of body/mind functioning vibrates at its collective frequency—the body/mind/spirit vessel, named YOU. I experience the human being not simply as an isolated physical organism, but as a multidimensional participant within a larger field of life.

We are subject and object. Individual and collective. We perceive the world through the particular organisation of our own human instrument, while simultaneously participating in and influencing the environments and relationships of which we are a part.

From this perspective, consciousness is not only something occurring privately “inside” us. Our actions, reflexes, attention, emotional states, choices and expressions enter the field in which we collectively live.

This is one of the conceptual lenses through which I explore human development: as the individual organism changes its relationship with awareness, what becomes possible within the collective also changes.

The often-told story of the “hundredth monkey” has been used as a metaphor for this possibility — the idea that when something shifts sufficiently within a group, a wider field of possibility may also shift. I don't need the story to function as scientific proof for it to remain an interesting contemplation.

Nature continually shows us that no organism exists independently of its environment. We influence and are influenced. We receive and transmit. We participate.

So I remain curious:

What am I contributing to the field through the way I am being?

Subjective — What am I experiencing?

Objective — What can we observe about the body, brain, nervous system, behaviour and environment?

Relational — What happens between organisms?

Collective — How do patterns, behaviours, ideas and ways of being propagate through groups and culture?

Universal / spiritual — What is the relationship between the individual expression of life and the greater intelligence or field of life itself?

Mystery — What can be experienced or contemplated without needing to be prematurely explained?

Perhaps this is another way of understanding responsibility, not as blame or burden, but as recognising that our expression participates in the whole.

'Discover Worlds Within' by Marie Louise

The art of process

What if life isn't asking us to arrive, but to participate?

There is an intelligence to process. We can see it everywhere in nature.

A seed contains possibility, but possibility alone does not make a garden. Soil matters. Water matters. Light matters. Timing matters. The environment matters and there is something within the seed itself that knows how to move towards expression.

Perhaps we are not so different.

Our lives are continually being shaped through the relationship between what is within us and the environments in which we live; our experiences, relationships, conditioning, attention, choices and the ways we respond to what life presents.

And within that relationship is something powerful:

Our capacity to consciously participate.

We Are Always in Process

Human development is often spoken about as though there is somewhere we are supposed to arrive.

A better version of ourselves. More healed. More evolved. More successful. More spiritual. More together.

But what if the invitation isn't to finally become finished?

What if it is to become increasingly available to the process of being alive? Our bodies are continually responding.

Our nervous systems are continually receiving information. Our emotions move. Our thoughts change. Our relationships reveal us. Our environments affect us. Life happens. And through all of it, something is continually being expressed, reorganised, discovered and created.

When we begin to pay attention to this movement, development becomes less about manufacturing a new self and more about developing a relationship with the human being already here.

Attention Is Part of the Environment

We often think of environment as something outside us; the room we live in, the people around us, the food we eat, the culture we inhabit.

But attention is also an environment. What we repeatedly give attention to influences what becomes familiar.

The stories we rehearse. The sensations we notice or ignore. The assumptions we continue to make. The possibilities we allow ourselves to perceive. This doesn't mean pretending everything is wonderful or using positive thinking to override what is actually happening.

It means becoming curious about the quality of attention we bring to our experience.

• What am I nourishing?

• What am I rehearsing?

• What am I protecting?

• What am I giving life to?

• What might become possible if I brought awareness somewhere new?

Trust and Action

This is where the art of process becomes interesting. There is a dance between trust and action and subjective experience. Between listening and moving. Between allowing and choosing. Between recognising that life carries an intelligence of its own and recognising that we are not passive spectators within it. We participate. We can tend the soil. We can change environments. We can interrupt patterns. We can listen differently. We can choose where attention goes. We can become curious about our conditioning rather than unconsciously living from it. We can notice contraction without immediately making it wrong. We can act when action is called for and allow space when something needs time.

This is not control.

It is self-governance.

The capacity to be in relationship with what is moving through us while becoming increasingly conscious of how we meet it.

The Garden Doesn't Bloom by Force

There is something wonderfully humbling about a garden. You can create conditions that support life, but you cannot pull a flower open. You can water it. Feed the soil. Give it light. Protect it when necessary. Prune what no longer serves its growth. And then there is an element of allowing.

Human beings can be similar. Our fullest expression isn't necessarily something we have to force into existence. Perhaps part of our work is creating the conditions in which more of what is already alive within us can emerge.

• Awareness.

• Attention.

• Movement.

• Rest.

• Relationship.

• Play.

• Curiosity.

• Love.

• Challenge.

• Expression.

• Food/thoughts/friends

All become part of the environment. And importantly, so do the difficult parts of being human.Process isn't only the beautiful blooming.It is also the compost.

• The uncertainty.

• The seasons when nothing appears to be happening.

• The things that fall away.

• The moments that ask us to meet ourselves differently.

Nothing in nature blooms continuously.

From Potential to Expression

Potential is an interesting word. We can spend our lives trying to reach our potential as though it exists somewhere ahead of us. But perhaps potential is not simply a destination. Perhaps it is something life continually invites into expression. A possibility becomes an action. An intuition becomes a choice. A feeling becomes communication.An idea becomes creation. An awareness changes a response.

Something once unconscious becomes visible, and suddenly another possibility exists.

This is where process becomes practice and practice becomes expression. Not through perfection.Through participation.

Get Your Skin in the Game

We don't learn the art of process only by understanding it intellectually. We experience it through

• Our bodies.

• Our relationships.

• Our reactions.

• Our creativity.

• Our choices.

• Our grief.

• Our joy.

• Our resistance.

• Our desires.

• Our willingness to begin again.

The human organism becomes both the instrument and the place of inquiry and perhaps that is part of the extraordinary opportunity of being alive: to become curious about the life moving through us, to participate consciously in its unfolding, and to create the conditions in which more of our innate nature can find expression.

This is an invitation to tend the garden. Give attention to the soil. Notice what you're feeding. Pull a weed occasionally. Plant something wildly optimistic. Leave some room for things you didn't plan and trust that not every stage of becoming needs to look like a flower.

You are not a finished product.

You are life in process and there is an art to participating in what wants to bloom.

Continue the exploration

Discover Worlds Within is an experiential exploration of the human organism — body, mind, emotions, energy, nervous system, spirit and consciousness — and what becomes possible as we develop greater awareness of the life moving through us.

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